#######################################################
## 					REPLICATION MATERIAL 
## 
## "Who's to Blame: Political Centralization and 
##  Electoral Punishment under Authoritarianism"
##
##
##					   	   by 				 			 	  
##		Quintin H. Beazer & Ora John Reuter
##
##					      in							 	  
## 				The Journal of Politics		 	  
##													 	  
#######################################################

This readme.txt file details all the materials provided here to reproduce numerical results from the tables and figures in both the article's main body and in the appendix.  

To ask questions or report a suspected error, please contact the authors. We are happy to correspond with others about the project. Send emails to: Quintin Beazer (qbeazer@fsu.edu) or John Reuter (reutero@uwm.edu)  



## DATA FILES
#############

"mayorsJOP.dta"
	- Dataset of mayoral selection status and Russian regional election results at the city-level
	- unit of observation: city-year in which regional election took place
	- Use this file to replicate statistical results from:
		- the main text (Tables 1-4)
		- the appendix (A1, A3-A8).
	- Saved in Stata 12 format
	
"mayorsJOPduma.dta"
	- Dataset of mayoral selection status and Russian national parliamentary and presidential election results at the city-level
	- unit of observation: city-year in which national legislative or parliamentary election took place
	- Use this file to replicate statistical results from:
		- the main text (Table 5)
		- the appendix (A9).
	- Saved in Stata 12 format

"mayorsJOPmun.dta"
	- Dataset of municipal mayoral election results at the city-level
	- unit of observation: city-year in which municipal election took place
	- Use this file to replicate statistical results from the appendix (A2).
	- Saved in Stata 12 format

	
Auxiliary data files:
"mayorsJOPmun.dta"
	- Dataset of municipal mayoral election results at the city-level
	- unit of observation: city-year in which municipal election took place
	- Use this file to replicate statistical results from the appendix (A2).
	- Saved in Stata 12 format
	
"RusCityMap.dta"
	- Dataset of latitude and longitude data of included cities
	- Use this file to replicate map from main text (Fig 1).
	- Saved in Stata 12 format

"RUSmap"
	- Folder of shapefiles of the Russian Federation
	- Use this folder of files to replicate map from main text (Fig 1).
	- Place in same folder with the accompanying .R script


## SCRIPTS & REPLICATION CODE
#############################

The replication materials contain 2 Stata .do files and 1 .R script:

1.) "BeazerReuterJOPtable.do"
2.) "BeazerReuterJOPtappendix.do"
3.) "BeazerReuterJOPplots.R"

Filenames generally indicate what results can be replicated using each file. In addition, each file contains a short preamble detailing exactly which tables and figures are associated with that particular file.  

At the beginning of each file, there is a line of code for users to set the working directory to the location where these replication files have been downloaded.  To ensure that the code runs smoothly, we recommend that users take the time to replace the placeholders ("XXXXX") with the appropriate file path.  Within each file, we have tried to add clarifying comments alongside the replication code to make the data manipulation and analyses transparent.  

